In order to fund future developments along these lines, I'm selling them through Gumroad. Think of it this way: buying a set of these rigs is like getting me dinner to say thanks for all the awesome stuff you're going to animate with them. :) Thanks to everyone who is supporting this project. You're all awesome!

P.S. If you're an instructor looking to grab these up for your classes, or a workshop, you can do so by selecting the Volume License option in Gumroad's payment section and choose the number of licenses that is right for your case.
Check out the Single-user License Agreement and the Volume License Agreement for more info.

Just wondering. Can you use these as a base rig and attach new geometry? Like create a new copy of the file then add a new smooth bind and paint weights? I'm wonder since this could help with initial animation and then let me render my own characters as long as they have similar proportions.

wow- I've sent this link to all the animators I know- this is doing a massive amount of amateur(and professional) animators such a tremendous favour, rigs/models like these have never been available to the internet like this before! I'm really in awe, thank you so much! You'll be seeing these everywhere before long!

Maybe in the future there'll be a facial rig setup as well, and you can be sure I'll be front of the line, cash in hand.... but until then, thank you so much for making these available to purchase by anyone! I can't wait to test them out :)

@Anonymous, great question. No you may not use these rigs as rigging tools themselves. They are for character animators to use for training purposes.

If you're looking for a great, affordable tool for doing this, check out Rapid Rig Advanced on CreativeCrash.com or for a more robust setup, Rapid Rig Modular. Of the two, RRA is really easy to setup, but only builds biped rigs, where RRM has more settings, but can build pretty much any rig you can think up.

For about the same price as this rig pack, you can follow a couple quick tutorials and make the exact rig you need. Check it out!

HI, thank's for your rig, you make a happy animator. I want to ask you if you continue your serie of character. I search a rig of a dog in your style. Maybe you do it one after? No matter,congratulation for your work,i'm gonna try your rig. And sorry for my approximatif english, i hope i don't be rude.

@Jessica, Thanks for the kind words!I'm not really interested in making rigs with facial setups, partly because I would have to charge as much as longwintermembers.com , and those rigs are brilliant, from what I can tell. If you're not familiar, check them out.

Hello there, First off, I'd like to thank you for providing these great rigs at such an affordable cost. I bought them about an hour ago and am already loving the control and appeal of them. I was wondering if there is a tutorial or explanation on how to install the picker? I wasn't sure if it was a feature just for Animschool students or whether it came with the purchase of the rigs. Any help on the matter would be much appreciated, please pardon my ignorance. Again,thank you so much for the awesome rigs!!! -Jade

I'm working with your rigs to make some test animation, and for fun... I ran into a problem though, I put an nCloth cape on herc, and as soon as I create any nMesh it looks like the rig gets unattached to the body mesh. Any insight?

p.s. Heard you graduated from RIT. I just got my degree in Film/ animation there :)

I'm not a simulation expert, but typically if you're going to make an nMesh for colliding with the cape, it's a good idea to duplicate the geometry and blendshape it (worldspace) to the original mesh, and then make that duplicated geo the nMesh. Geometry with skin clusters don't behave well as nMeshes, in my limited experience.

First of all thank you so much for making these available!! They look fantastic!! I'm very excited to purchase them, and was wondering if you have a timeline as to when they might once again be available?

Oh, I thought I missed my opportunity to get these rigs. I'm learning Cinema4d right now, but would like to revisit Maya for character animation and simple rigging. Just seeing the range of character and the old flour sack sparked my interest.

Hmm, that frame rate is a little low. I've tested the rigs in 2014 and 2015 on both faster and slower machines, and haven't ever seen anything that low, especially in vp2 with all the fancy stuff turned off. Even on slow machines with old graphics cards, I get around 18 fps worst case scenario.

Could it be that your mesh is smoothed, or has the smooth preview turned on? Try selecting the geometry and hitting "1" to see if it improves.

It looks like you have a laptop with an integrated graphics card. Some times the latest drivers can have issues. You could test rolling back to a previous driver. You could also try getting the latest service pack of Maya. 2015 has had a few bugs in the original and first service pack that could be affecting performance.

I am interested in using these for a character animation class that I teach. The class is about 18 seats, but it repeats each semester. Do I need to buy the 25 volume license every semester, or am I covered just purchasing it once?

These look awesome. Looking forward to seeing what the students do with them.

Thanks for your question. Yes, you will need a license for each student that uses the rigs, so if you have a new group of students each semester, you'll want to plan on either buying on a semester by semester basis, or get a larger pack for the whole year. The volume discount gets better the more you need. Feel free to email me at josephsdaniels (at) gmail (dot) com if you have more questions.

I don't think I ever made a Gumroad account, my emails aren't attached to one. I think I just purchased it directly without logging into anything. And I'm not sure why the comment engine decided to call me 'Tawdde'... :)

Hi! Got the rigs pack the other day and I'm enjoying it loads! Great stuff Daniel! Regarding the slow frame rate when playing animations on view port; I figured out that even in high end computers Maya really struggles to show up a decent frame rate. That is totally up to the number of skinclusters resolved by Maya...the less the better I'm afraid! You can test this easily by hiding both arms (as they have quite a lot of geometries skinned) in character control channel box options. As soon as I hide the arms I achieve a consistent 30fps (the frame rate I set for my animation) But showing up the whole character is giving me just around 15/18. To solve this I usually duplicate the geometry skinned and combine it in a single mesh, one single skincluster (even dual quaternion one) is really fast for Maya to resolve and allows you to iterate much faster. You can have both characters, one for the whole character and the original one in case you need to hide some parts, which is quite useful too.

Hope you find this helpful.

Happy animated new year to everybody!

I started to test the rig with a simple jump test: https://vimeo.com/115708353

First off thanks for the awesome rigs! Very much enjoying them. I'm getting an issue that's a bit of a nuisance however, with some controls I get a delay interacting in the graph editor. The CoG for example, if I click any key in the graph editor it takes about a second for it to register. Same with moving keys, I have to wait a second before it catches up. Wondering if anyone else has had this issue or if there might be a fix out there...

Hey there. I am incredibly new to 3D modeling, as such all I have access to is Blender (as it is free). I would still LOVE to get a hold of these as they'd be a lot of fun for character design and finding the right poses when drawing. Would I be able to open these in Blender or are they only functional in Maya?

@Mr. BaylessThat's a great question. Blender is a lot of fun, and I often use it for modeling. While my rigs won't be able to be opened in Blender directly, if you have access to the student version of Maya (free) you would be able to take the rigs and pose them as you like to export to Blender as .obj or .fbx files. Otherwise, I'm not aware of any means of converting the files to a format that Blender will take, without first having Maya.